Someone, somewhere created the very first Web log. It's just not quite clear who.

It may not be one of the Internet's grandest accomplishments, but with the number of active bloggers hovering somewhere around 100 million, according to one estimate,
there are some serious bragging rights to be claimed by the first person who provably laid fingers to keyboard in the traditional bloggy
way.

Was the first blogger the irascible Dave Winer? The
iconoclastic Jorn Barger? Or was the first blogger really Justin Hall, a Web diarist and online gaming expert whom The New York Times Magazine once called the "founding father of personal blogging"?

December 1997
Jorn Barger's RobotWisdom.com site
apparently becomes the first to call itself a Web
log.

Sometime in 1999
 Brad Fitzpatrick
launches Livejournal, which he calls his "accidental success."
 Peter Merholz of Peterme.com declares he has decided "to pronounce the word
'weblog' as 'wee-blog.' Or 'blog' for short."
 The word "blog" first appears in print, according to dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster.

August 1999 Three friends who founded a San Francisco start-up called Pyra Labs
create a tool called Blogger "more or less on a whim."

Or did all three merely make incremental improvements on earlier
proto-blogs? The answer is most likely "yes" to all of the above. In truth, awarding the title "first blogger" is more than a little tricky because the definitions of blog and blogger are slippery. Any definition should probably include posts sorted by date, with the newest posts at the top and the rest archived for future use (criteria that would eliminate the Drudge Report, for instance).

Winer is a pioneer of Web syndication techniques and editor of
Scripting News, which launched on
April 1, 1997.

He boasts on his site that Scripting News "bootstrapped the blogging
revolution" and that it is the "longest currently running Web log on the Internet." A decade ago, however, Winer wasn't actually using the term "Web log," nor does he claim to have invented the term. Winer did not respond to repeated requests for comment from CNET News.com until after this article appeared. He replied in a post claiming "the first blogs were inspired" by Scripting News.

Barger, a programmer, futurist and James Joyce scholar, is not afraid to say, indeed, he's the guy who invented the term "Web log." In December 1997, he created RobotWisdom.com to feature entirely bloggy collections of links to articles about politics, culture, books and technology that he found interesting.

"Since I made up the word, I assume I get to define it," Barger said in an e-mail message to CNET News.com on Monday. "And by my strictest definition Winer wasn't quite a blog--he mixed up the reverse-chronological ordering too much. So--unsurprisingly--the first 100 percent Weblog would be mine."

Barger said his site amounted to something of a day-to-day log of his reading and intellectual pursuits--and because it was online, he called it a "WebLog."
And thus a new term, which would soon be abbreviated and de-capitalized to "blog" by Peter Merholz of Peterme.com, was born.

"Winer called them 'news pages,' but I didn't plan to do mainly news, but rather anything I found that I thought was worth reading or visiting," Barger said in an e-mail. "So at the last minute I needed to come up with a title, and I used AltaVista to see whether various possibilities were already taken (with 'log' being the critical descriptive term). 'Weblog' was being used as a synonym for 'server log' or 'html log' by site administrators, but since they had the other options I grabbed the more general one."

Building on the .plan But as any Internet graybeard will tell you, early Net denizens were just as active in sharing details of their personal lives and commenting on politics (though, perhaps, not the antics of their pet cats) as the latest generation of bloggers. They did it on mailing lists and through a now virtually forgotten technique called a ".plan" file that was invented in the early 1970s.

A .plan file was a publicly visible text file of any length that could be attached to each individual account on a Unix system and often used reverse-chronological blog-like ordering with newer items at the top. Internet users could edit their own .plan files to include details of their personal life, work projects or musings on the nature of reality.

Many did. One of the most famous .plan files was created by John Carmack, who co-founded Id Software and was the lead programmer on blockbuster video games including Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D. (Carmack's .plan file has since been converted to a blog.)

NCSA's What's New page was without a doubt the prototypical Weblog. It was in all respects identical to today's blogs, carrying snippets of info about new sites that shown up on the brand new "Web" the day before. It was maintained by a couple of editors and was one of the most-viewed sites on the early World Wide Web.

For all of the spin and hype from people like Dave Winer and others, it is an inescapable fact that this weblog predates their efforts by 5 or 6 years, used HTML, was updated several times a day, and was a weblog in every sense except for the terminology.

I had a weblog on my personal homepage that I called a Digital Diary, back in 1996. It was tech related observations and comments on news items. I have changed websites over the years, but I've always maintained the diary. I still do it on my site www.SteveJordanBooks.com, under the name Techlog.

I personally never liked the name "blog," but if that's what everyone else wants to call it, okay.

While being away in 1993 on a 6 month student exchange I programmed a little diary application which used hypertext and tags to track my daily activities.

The daily entries where shown on the home page and different words where linked to my money tracker (typing "stamps" would popup a window asking for the amount of stamps and then calculated the expenses, the same worked for bus tickets, sandwiches etc.) The program allowed to search for posts and to add additional notes. When my friends came over, they were able to add their own witty comments to the entries, making it a nice memory of my semester as AFS student.

There were various login/user levels and the program even exported certain parts of my entries to text files for e-mailing them overseas to family and friends.

That offline program was similar in many ways to todays Wordpress platform however it was written on a PowerBook 170 using HyperCard...

Too bad I had protected the HyperCard stack with a password which I've now forgotten. The diary is still here but cannot be opened any more... Duh!

This article is interesting and seems to me very one sided. So we believe we invented something new, really new! A way to express ourselves, our believes and do this in a public forum. BLOGS...yeah! Looking closely the whole discussion about who had the first blog, who wrote it, seems irrelevant. Isn't what the blog offers something that we should cherish?

Now an article over the phenomenon of blogs would be much more interesting. A blog used to voice an opinion is one, a blog blabbing about everything in the information age where you just toss out useless information is are the two ends of a spectrum. The consequences of the two are different, that is the key to see culture evolve and see change.

I would contest that Karl Kraus in 1899 had a blog! Relative to the technology in existence. I also believe that he is probably not the earliest "blogger".

The Torch was Karl Kraus' medium and it is a source for the history of the time, for its language and its transgressions. Karl Kraus in his own typical and idiosyncratic manner dealt with the themes of journalism and war, of sex and crime, of politics and corruption, of literature and lying. The influential journal »Die Fackel« comprises in literally thousands of texts an enormous thematic variety in a great number of different text types, such as essays, notes, commentaries, aphorisms, poems, drama and other literary expressions.

So when I see this you have to ask the question, what are we really looking for? The first technology that allowed voicing your opinion on the internet on stuff? I would start with forums then. Or do we look for the social impact, commentary and documentation of the times that have value long after we are gone.

This is what I never understood about the whole blog hype; there was a way of doing this log before we put the label on it. Is it really important to read someone?s journal on the web? Is this itself a something that needs to be documented that we got so lonely that we have to tell a web audience in relative anonymity about our day? Why is this, is it because we forgot how to communicate with each other. How to listen?

So I think if you want to find the first blog or blogger you have to go way back and frankly '72 in your chronology does not cut it! Seems to me a very self centered view only considering a certain technology, but not the problem addressed.

What a shame Dave Winer had a pain at the party! (With apologies to John Lennon, who wrote "What a Shame Mary Jane" -- a rare Beatles outtake).

For what it's worth, I started writing a diary online as of Nov. 2, 1995 (at 6 p.m.). It's title: "What's the New Maryjane?" and you can still read it: <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.rockument.com/thought2.html" target="_newWindow">http://www.rockument.com/thought2.html</a>

The first entry quotes Thomas Pynchon: "In the name of the cathode, the anode, and the holy grid." I called it a "web broadcast."

As a newsletter editor, on Dec. 25, 1996, I converted my newsletter into a free online column called "The Bove &#38; Rhodes Report" and its first entry can be found here:<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.rockument.com/bove01.html" target="_newWindow">http://www.rockument.com/bove01.html</a>

Maybe these weren't the first, but online diaries and columns were proliferating way before Winer and others created RSS. Give them credit for the structure of delivery and the technology, but not the idea.

This is an excellent history. Good to document the way we used to work. But I'm disappointed that Keith Dawson's JargonScout isn't mentioned. That's where I learned the word "blog" in 1999: <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.tbtf.com/jargon-scout.html#blog" target="_newWindow">http://www.tbtf.com/jargon-scout.html#blog</a>

After starting an early ISP, io.com, SJ Games kicked off a blog to advertise our upcoming games (which at the time were Illuminati: New World Order, a card game, and In Nomine, a role-playing game). The Daily Illuminator ran from 1994 uninterrupted to the present day. It meets this article's blog criteria: in HTML, dated entries bottom to top, archives available for browsing.

When I was working at Cyborganic at the ripe old age of 18 way back in 1996 we built an episodic blog in PERL/CGI that featured 6 or 7 dot.commers based in SF called Geek cereal. I believe this was the first "ad supported Blog for Profit" that was launched. At the same time, Cyborganic's sister company (and Jonathan Steuer's literal brother's company) launched a New York based version called, "The Couch".

In addition to this.. I always thought Justin Hall's "Links from the Underground" site.. gosh I think it was based at links.org.. This was a site where he blogged about interesting links that were starting to show up on the very new internet.. as well as bloggin about his travels throughout America introducing the internet to the people..

Rod Amis is the longest Blogger on the Internet, his blog, 'Don't Read Me First', later renamed 'My Glass House', found it's way to WWW, through Mr. Rod Amis's ZINE, G21.

The Zine hit the WWW back in 1995. And it has never left. His Blog, a journal about his life and travels, has been requested to be turned into a biography.

Mr. Amis, a trained writer, has been publisher &#38; editor of his ZINE for 16 years, the first five were a paper journal, that was US MAILED delivered (snail-mail) to a list of dedicated subscribers.

It can't be disputed, because the ZINE and blog have had the same URL since it creation on the WWW. Yes the word was ZINE.

Mr. Amis has found himself jobless and homeless over the years, but he was still able to deliver the ZINE and the Blog 'My Glass House', on a bi-weekly schedule, that he rarely missed. He has produced the Zine &#38; Blog while living in 6 locations over the last 16 years. A true testament to coffee house editing, and wireless hook-ups.

In 1984, David Rodale used the PARTI software on the Source to document the events of his daily life and, ultimately, death (AIDS).

The Source was the first internationally accessible (thanks to Telnet and TYMNET networks) consumer timesharing service available to dialup subscribers for comparatively low hourly rates.

PARTIcipate, the Source's licensed "conferencing" software (aka tree-structured BBS with a slew of innovative capabilities), made it easy for Source members to read and comment on other members' individually generated, long-running threaded-message journals, or logs, or discussions ("conferences"), and also to selectively point to or retrieve single posts within individual journals.

Ask Joi Ito. He was there around that time, a young kid who "ported" (by downloading and then reuploading) PARTI conferences to TWICS, the network in Japan that was roughly similar to the Source or EIES. I'm sure he'd remember David Rodale's PARTI conference.

Seems 1995 for modern times was the date to shoot for. And then a dispute over what blogging is, would then need to be ironed out.

This is an interesting discussion, because so much of tech. history is being falsely recorded, mostly by the Valley co.s who have big media machines behind them.

I run a company and my founder has been in the business going on 45 to 50 years. He started at IBM after being plucked out of the US Military, and then went to what they called IBM college. He was teaching it 1 year later, at the US Air Force Division.

He went onto RAND. He is a systems and OS expert, but he has told me that at RAND and other places he worked, things were being invented on a monthly basis. But it was G12 clearance in those days, and you weren't walking home after work and telling the world or your wife, what you had created that day, or what you had seen created.

It would be a good time to at least get some different opinions and versions of how it all went down. Or we might be left with AL GORE really getting all the credit for inventing the Internet.

The Internet and all it's tools like the Browser, would be a good place to start, concerning correcting the history being recorded surrounding it's creation.

We called them Web Tours back then:<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.trottamedia.com/fitnesstour.html" target="_newWindow">http://www.trottamedia.com/fitnesstour.html</a>and did short columns each week:<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.trottamedia.com/exciteindex.html" target="_newWindow">http://www.trottamedia.com/exciteindex.html</a>All best,GT

I began using the Internet in 1994, I think, and since I had a love for journaling and writing since I was a kid, it only made sense that I would search for a medium that allowed me to do this through online media.

Voila! I discovered OpenDiary.com, which was around when I began my first blog ever, there in 1998. And I'm still with the site and many others.

I love blogs, and with social media and Web 2.0 (YouTube, etc.), the power of Internet continues to fascinate me unendingly.

NASA Watch went online in April 1996 - and as been online ever since. I was interviewed on PBS' Newshour about it on 29 Nov 1996 - see <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/fedagencies/" target="_newWindow">http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/fedagencies/</a>nasa_11-29.html - at the time it was called "NASA RIF Watch". I dropped the "RIF" after a year or so.

<a href="http://www.sjgames.com/ill/">The Daily Illuminator</a>, published by Steve Jackson Games, is a blog. <a href="http://www.sjgames.com/ill/past.columns.html">Its archives</a> go all the way back to November 1994.

In an antiquated world with no technology, Benjamin Franklin stood alone as the first and foremost blogger and social networker.

Franklin?s editorials were printed weekly in almost every newspaper in the American colonies, much like the blogs people post today. And each day of the week for over twenty years, he penned pithy sayings in Poor Richard?s Almanac?sayings that at under a hundred and forty characters long could easily be considered the same as tweets today. He also corresponded with over six hundred people worldwide by snail-mail on a yearly basis, more names than most people have in their entire email address book.

In extensive research on Ben Franklin for my new historical time travel novel, Lightning Strikes the Colonies, (to be published November 1st) it was interesting to learn that this incredible humanitarian, scientist, and journalist was the first to network world wide.

I was doing a blog in June of 1982. I was blogging at my site Howard's Notebook, a BBS, until the world wide was invented in 1995 and then I moved it to the web. It is still going. I have been online 247/7 since 1982. In March of 1984 Ric Manning wrote in "Link-Up" magazine about my site. Part of what Ric said is; "...One of the menu choices is a chatty letter from Howard that discusses his latest tinkering with the system or his opinions on the general state of BBS communication. Another menu choice reviews excerpts from Howard's fan mail, and a third contains information on computer groups, local BBS numbers and computer ham networks..."Folks I say that was a blog and that was the birth of Howard's Notebook. I say I am the father of all blogs and the inventor of the blog! You could even dial into my blog and from a list pick information and then my system would dial out on another modem and phone line and connect you to the other site. I think my site has all the marks of a true blog. Now there may have been others doing it at the same time and even before me..I do not know of them... The one fact I do know is that blogging was NOT invented in 1995 or 1996. I was blogging in 1982. www.hnbdo.com www.showmeblog.com

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